Loneliness & Life satisfaction: how many WELLBYs are lost due to loneliness?

Being lonely has significant negative impacts on life satisfaction. I use such estimates from research to approximate the cost of being lonely in terms of WELLBY lost. A WELLBY is equal to a one-point change in life satisfaction (when measured on a 0-10 scale) per person per year (see further e.g. De Neve et al, 2020).

• Peytrignet et al. (2020)’s report examines the impact of loneliness on life satisfaction and finds on the basis of two UK surveys and find that any level of loneliness is associated with decreases in life satisfaction. In particular, I’m drawing numbers from their technical supplement.
• Using the Community Life Survey, where being lonely is measured on a 5 point scale from ‘Never’ to ‘Often/Always,’ the impacts are as follows in the table below (where the first two columns are directly from the report). The estimates are controlled for year of interview, household size, household income, sex, age, marital status, economic status among others.
• For the purposes of this shallow report, I’m interested in an initial approximation of country-level WELLBYs lost and will not add time discounting but I note fluctuations year-to-year seems to be less than 5% and there is further guidance on how to incorporate annual changes and discounts from the Social Impacts Task Force.
• To estimate the population-level WELLBYs lost, I am using estimates from the ONS about how many people experienced different levels of loneliness in the same year as the report (2020), though as this year includes some of the lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK, they are likely not generalizable and possibly overestimates.

• The other estimates in this report come from the Understanding Society survey (measures only ‘Often’ or ‘Some of the time’ lonely), and are similarly controlled for a number of relevant variables (e.g. life satisfaction in previous survey waves, economic status, gender, age etc.)

• Layard et al. (2020) estimate the loss of one year’s life as 7.5 WELLBYs lost. If we take the more conservative estimate of 8.58 million WELLBYs lost annually due to loneliness, this would equate to 1,144,000 (1.14 million) years lost annually in the UK.
  • The average life expectancy in the UK is about 81 years, so this would mean 14, 123 lives lost annually attributable to loneliness.

How effective are interventions addressing loneliness and social isolation?

• Overall, there is some evidence for effectiveness based on a rich body of systematic reviews. I note a lot of variance and relatively small samples. It is hard to assess which intervention types are most effective.
• Many systematic reviews comment that the majority of included studies do not explicitly target people who are lonely. I note in many cases services are provided to a particular population where the mechanism of the intervention does not seem as the most theoretically appropriate route for change. Few interventions provide theoretical basis for their research designs or services (see further Bessaha et al., 2020)
• A meta-analysis of interventions aiming to reduce loneliness by Masi et al. (2011) supports the effectiveness of interventions aiming to alleviate loneliness. Interventions were categorized into four main intervention types, those that 1) improve social skills, 2) enhance social support, 3) increase opportunities for social contact, and 3) address maladaptive social cognition. A moderator analysis with intervention type was carried out in single group pre-post studies, where intervention type could not explain difference in effect size (i.e. did not provide evidence that, for instance, addressing maladaptive social cognition was more effective than improving social skills etc.) There was notably heterogeneity in interventions and participant populations.
• When looking at the included randomized group comparisons, Masi & colleagues noted effect sizes that were smaller than would be anticipated in social and behavioral interventions. A meta-analysis of 302 social and behavioral interventions (Lipsey & Wilson, 2001) showed that on average interventions generate a mean effect size of 0.50. Masi & colleagues estimate that their mean effect size of loneliness interventions, -0.198 would be around ‘the bottom 15% of the distribution” of effects in the broader field of social and behavioral work, pointing to a lower degree of efficacy. This likely speaks to the difficulty in providing effective loneliness interventions.

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